Frank ran into some trouble back in the 1980’s but I’ve never had any issues with him, after hundreds of encounters at area events over the decades.

If I had to guess, SHEPARD is for astronaut Alan Shepard and AIRCRAFT CARRIERS is a reference to the Russian-built Admiral Kuznetsov / Varyag / Liaoning and the like. I mean they’re sort of like aircraft carriers:

Leaving you with this – here he is from a decade back at the final Castro Halloween, when he encountered some dude dressed as Frank Chu. (And later that night, a kid from the projects shot nine people on Market near Noe and that was the end of Halloween in the Castro.)

Someday I’ll ride one of these big heavy bikes, definitely for 30 minutes or less though…

(BABS / Ford doesn’t care what you think about BABS, not really. It will give you half your money back if you get confused by its marketing and end up getting charged ten times more than you thought you would, IF you contact them about your experience, so there’s that…)

And then they have their big Nissan vans – they double park, park on the sidewalks and make illegal turns off of Market all the time. Is that kosher?

And what’s up with these Ford pickups all illegally parked next to each other basically every day at the BABS station on Market near 5th? They’re still showing up. Does the reflective triangle make everything OK? IDK

Any connection here? IDK.

And the Yelp ratings are in the cellar, still. Seems like people are paying a lot of money for these bikes, considering what they get, and some people at some companies are millionaires now, and speaking of millions, taxpayers will end up paying tens of millions afore this program gets defunded or whathaveyou.

All is not well in BABS-land these days.

And I can’t wait to see all the Ford ads, which, one assumes, will be plastered all over, soon…

[UPDATE: Obviously, our state and federal constitutions don’t require MUNI to carry political ads. MUNI does so in order to make money. MUNI wants to make money, right? If MUNI really really didn’t like these ads on the sides of their buses, they’re fully empowered to eliminate them. But they don’t. Why? Can you guess? Because of the money. How else can one explain that? And if you don’t understand something what’s hotlinked, you’re supposed to click on the link instead of complaining about how you don’t understand pop culture. ENDOFLINE.]

This one’s new. I’m seeing it all over town. It makes me think of transparent dangling carrots, I’m srsly. It gives me an earworm is what I’m saying.

Oh what’s that, SFMTA – you don’t really want to weigh in on the Mideast, but the money’s just too good to say no?

Imagine a future SFMTA with 10,000 employees, which will happen soon enough. Maybe at that point it will start issuing foreign policy papers.

You cannot monetize public assets for individual company gain. Just because an app can be built, doesn’t mean it should be.

I’m a Co-Founder and CEO of a San Francisco based startup called CARMAnation (www.carmanation.com). We look to help solve parking issues via the true intentions of the sharing economy – working with the community to benefit the community. Our users share their PRIVATE available parking spots with one another.

Having tech startups trying to solve the parking problems with their own unique approach means there is a need to disrupt the industry. Technology is a wonderful thing, it can solve/simplify a lot of problems, but it has to be done right, otherwise “Monkey Parking” is what happens.”